As a rhetorical template for Trump’s speech, many recalled Richard Nixon’s acceptance address in 1968 — a time of turmoil and tragedy, the Vietnam war, racial unrest in cities and the murders of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

“To those who say law and order is the code word for racism,” Nixon declared, “there and here is a reply. Our goal is justice for every American. If we are to have respect for law in the United States we must have laws that deserve respect.”

Nearly half a century later, Trump was coming from a similar place on urban crime, protecting cops, securing borders and making America safe from terror attacks. As a vision piece, it was pretty dark, but as Trump put it: “We cannot afford to be so politically correct anymore.”

Well, no one has ever accused him of that.

“Homicides last year increased by 17 per cent in America’s 50 largest cities,” he said. “That’s the largest increase in 25 years. In our nation’s capital, killings have increased by 50 per cent. They are up nearly 60 per cent in nearby Baltimore. In the president’s hometown of Chicago, more than 2,000 have been the victims of shootings this year alone. And more than 3,600 have been killed in the Chicago area since he took office.”

Trump had the decency to acknowledge that blacks are the principal victims of crime in American inner cities, noting that “nearly four in 10 African American children are living in poverty, while 58 per cent of African American youth are not employed.”

The audience for an acceptance speech isn’t really in the hall, but beyond — among the millions of voters engaging for the first time in an election campaign.

What would he do about it? “Every action I take,” he said, “I will ask myself: Does this make life better for young Americans in Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, Ferguson who have as much of a right to live out their dreams as any other child in America?”

As unusual as it was for Trump to reach out to black America, it was also surprising to see him do the same for LGBT Americans in the wake of the nightclub massacre in Orlando. “Forty-nine wonderful Americans were killed by an Islamic terrorist,” he said. “This time the terrorist targeted our LGBT community. As your president, I will do everything in my power to protect our LGBT citizens from the violence and oppression of a hateful foreign ideology.”

Those were the two most inclusive and presidential moments of Trump’s address. The rest of it was a long lamentation on what ails America — spoiler: It’s all Hillary Clinton’s fault. Touching on Mexican and Muslim immigrants, trade deals, the growth of ISIS on her watch as secretary of state — not to mention her private email account — Trump essentially called her Crooked Hillary.

“When a secretary of state,” Trump said, “illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequences — I know that corruption has reached a level like never before.

“In 2009, pre-Hillary, ISIS was not even on the map,” Trump claimed. “Libya was cooperating. Egypt was peaceful. Iraq was seeing a reduction in violence. Iran was being choked by sanctions. Syria was under control. After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region. Libya is in ruins, and our ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos. Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis that threatens the West …

“This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction and weakness.”

On trade, Trump would walk away from NAFTA and strongly opposes the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which (again) he blames on Bill and Hillary Clinton.

“Our horrible trade agreements with China and many others will be totally renegotiated,” Trump vowed. “That includes renegotiating NAFTA to get a much better deal for America — and we’ll walk away if we don’t get the deal we want.”

This will not have passed unnoticed in Ottawa at the department of International Trade. The Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement, forerunner of the NAFTA, was a bilateral deal between Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan. But it took over a year of very hard negotiations, and leadership at the top, to get it done.

The audience for an acceptance speech isn’t really in the hall, but beyond — among the millions of voters engaging for the first time in an election campaign.

Trump shared only a bit of his personal narrative — his love of his wife and children, his admiration for his parents and his devotion to his siblings, including a brother lost to alcoholism. But his daughter Ivanka kind of stole the show with her introduction of her father.

How did this all play out in the American heartland?

It is too soon to say. Trump is leading a party badly divided over his leadership, but after Cleveland it is clearly united in one respect — against Hillary Clinton.

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